


Guess This Means You're Sorry

by missmollyetc



Category: Primeval
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-27
Updated: 2009-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-05 08:30:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmollyetc/pseuds/missmollyetc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn't always all clones and black leather</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guess This Means You're Sorry

**Author's Note:**

> Primeval is a show about time-traveling dinosaurs and the woman who loves them. Also some scientists and the military.
> 
> Author's note (2): [This](http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinos/Archaeopteryx.shtml) is an Archaeopteryx. Everyone say Hi!

The first time she makes a poor choice between two waiting anomalies and winds up in the future, she doesn't know what year it is and couldn't care less. The lack of vegetation in the gravel pit where she lands and the pong in the air like fetid cabbage are all she needs to know. She wrinkles her nose, kicks a flattened square of plastic out from under her boot, and throws herself back into the past.

She breathes deeply once she's safely on the other side, feasting on the rich, sharp air of a cleaner era, and charges through the next anomaly into the Jurassic. Thick waist-high grass greets her on the other side, Pangea's splendor outshining anything her poor Sceptr'd Isle ever offered her. The anomaly prickles at her back, plucking the metal buckles of her utility harness away from her body. She walks forward until the magnetic pull subsides, and flicks open her camera case by habit. The sun is high enough in the sky for heat to prickle down the back of her throat. She reaches up to pull her ponytail out of her shirt collar and scratch her skin. She can see flowering trees off to her right, greens and blues--plants that don't have any name for themselves in this place, and so she names them for herself, calls one a peony just to be perverse and names its sister blossom, "Stephen's Poppy."

The foliage of one tree rustles. She pauses, feeling the light wind around her. It's not strong enough to move the tree's branches so violently. She snaps the cover off her lens. Her head turns, tracking the path of an Archaeopteryx gliding from one flowering branch to the next fifty meters from her position. She can't see whether or not it has friends up higher. Its green-banded brown wings flutter in the wind, and then fold against its elongated gastralia, clawed wing tips flex and fall still. The elegant curl of its scaled neck curves backward as it studies the trees above it. She aims her camera, and presses down on the shutter button. It's not a bird--not _yet_ anyway--but she can't help comparing it to the crows she chased out of her mother's garden as a child. The Archaeopteryx shrieks once, and takes wing, probably searching for prey.

Helen hunches lower in the grass, shoulders almost stooped. Her hand wavers over her belt knife. She eyes the sky above her, ears straining for the least rustle. The beast flaps its wings, catches a thermal as she watches and the light glints on its razor sharp teeth. It veers away from her, tail steering it in the opposite direction. She wonders if it's a scout, maybe merely lost. It's making for the trees at a more impressive clip than her studies had previously suggested. No great surprise there. After more than a year, the idea that paleontology's hindsight has an astigmatism is no longer outrageous. On the other hand, it might simply be a female and, as happens so often, more impressive than the male of the species. Helen huffs an amused breath, no more than a whisper of air against the grass. She stands.

Her head turns to the side and, for nothing more than the moment it takes for her to dismiss the image, she sees Nick, smiling at her side. He'd love this, maybe almost as much as she does. She wonders what he's doing.

She puts her camera away and begins to push her way through the grass in search of the Archaeopteryx.

 

End.


End file.
